A defamation action has closed five years after publication with a policeman plaintiff paying The Canberra Times the last instalment of $22,500 in costs over his unsuccessful action.
The policeman, Daniel Peter Edwards, sued over the publication in April, 1989, of a report of court proceedings in which he gave evidence. Mr Edwards won in the Magistrates Court, but the Supreme Court ruled the magistrate had erred. Justice Gallop said the report was fair and accurate and gave a correct impression that Mr Edward did not recall or did not know the answer to questions asked of him.
Evidence in the Magistrates Court suggested that most of Mr Edwards’s costs were being borne by the ACT Police Association.
The association has had to pay The Canberra Times $22,500 plus Mr Edwards’s own costs which would be about $15,000.
The Canberra Times’s solicitors, MacPhillamy, Cummins and Gibson, received the money last week.
The case was one of several at the beginning of a change of attitude to defamation by The Canberra Times, and indeed some other newspapers at the time. Before it was prepared to settle some cases for small amounts even if it thought they had little merit to “”get them out of the hair” or to stay out of court. The new policy was to fight those cases so plaintiffs knew The Canberra Times was not a “”soft touch”; to make sure plaintiffs knew there was a large financial risk in suing and that the defamation scene was not totally one of very large sums of money being paid by newspapers to plaintiffs.
The policy of publishing corrections and apologies when the paper was wrong continued, as the embarrassingly frequent appearance of corrections testifies.